Aasthik (आस्तिक) is a Sanskrit word which literally means Believer. I feel that to achieve anything in life, you need to believe. Whom you choose to believe - God, yourself, your abilities, ideals, principles, fate, luck or destiny is your choice. This blog includes posts on all sorts of things- technology, programming, day to day experiences, GOD, religion, spirituality, science, philosophy & theology.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Before I begin, I would like to mention that we are using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Visual Studio 2005 while its been quite a while when Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 was launched. Infact, Microsoft has already released a pre-beta cum developer version for Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 also known as Visual Studio 2014.

I was Microsoft Student Partner for 3 years and have trained more than 1000 students and faculty and even professionals in various Microsoft events throughout the country, meaning I have been a technology evangelist for 3 years prior to joining Samsung as a fresher graduate. I was also the Chief-Organizer of a half a dozen Microsoft DreamSpark International Programming Contests. I have mentioned this to tell you just this - I know exactly what I am talking about and what I am going to talk about.

As a result I prefer using latest technologies.I don't need to tell you why you would chose latest software. You would want Android 2.2 (Froyo) instead of 2.1 (Eclair); Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) instead of 2.2(Froyo); Android 4.0 (Ice-cream Sandwich) instead of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) wouldn't you? For the same reasons I want Windows7 and Visual Studio2010. Its a great help for developers and by investing in it, Samsung will have great advantages.

A quick overview of advantages of upgrading to Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010:

1. Both Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 are optimized for multi-core processing, however windows xp and visual studio 2005 are not. We are using Intel core i3, i5 & even i7 processors in the hardware but making no use of it. Isn't it sad and under-utilization of resources?

2. We are using Source Insight as a separate software to browse our code. I ask why? You can do it with the help of Visual Studio 2010. Eliminate an extra software. Also, browsing code in Visual Studio 2010 is 100 times better than Source Insight.

3. Right now we can't develop code simultaneously. We have to explicitly check-in our code into P4 server. Lets say we have a new implementation where the database team, the phonebook team and the message team needs to work together. In such a scenario, usually, I have seen they work on the same system, with the Visual Studio 2010, all the members involved will be using their respective desktops and making the changes simultaneously in one code. Once the implementation is successful locally, we can submit the change in perforce server.

4. With Visual Studio 2010, we have Microsoft Team Foundation server which is just like Perforce. It is integrated in Visual Studio 2010. What I am saying is this - we can eliminate Perforce as a separate software as well. We make code changes Visual Studio and submit directly to Team Foundation Server, no hackles of having to open a separate software and syncing the code and other stuff. Meanwhile we can carry out our other work in Visual Studio 2010.

5. Friendly user interface, makes the job easier for developers as it is easier to switch between windows, programs and tasks.

6. NO Blue Screens better known to the Windows Programmers as BSOD - Blue Screen of Death!

7. By eliminating SourceInsight and may be even Perforce, will effect the time efficiency, as we won't need to dedicate the time needed to add files to Source Insight and you know how much time synchronization takes.

8. Visual Studio 2010 takes the advantage of parallel processing and multi-threading so that you can work on your simulator while it is updating its intellisense database and synchronizing the files.

Basically speaking it will increase the developer productivity of the SGP team to 200%. The system won't hang as often it does. Its not affected by virus. I've been using Windows7 from is pre-beta version, then switched to Windows7 Ultimate and then Ultimate N, I have never used an anti-virus program.

I wanted to provide some tips in the first blog-post but since this has already been a long post I will post the material in part-2 of this blog post series Your Weekly Tips for Effective and Faster Debugging using Visual Studio. I would also like to mention that if had we beenusing Visual Studio 2010 I would have been able to provide you with many more shortcuts and efficiency increasing tricks. Still, Visual Studio 2005 has many hidden gems that I would be uncovering in the posts following this one.